By Benjamin McFadyean.
The small former coal mining town of Spiesen-Elversberg in the Saarland is in football fever, thanks mainly to the tactics of rising German coaching star Vincent Wagner, the backing of a local entrepreneur, and a strong community approach, rather than a vast transfer budget.
SV Elversberg is only in its third season in the 2. Bundesliga, and its achievements are truly the stuff of dreams. 40-year-old Wagner, the club’s coach since the departure of long-term manager of 6 years Horst Steffen in June, has managed to guide the ”Schwarz-Weißen’ to the Bundesliga in only his second season ever as a head coach.
Three teams were level on points going into the final round, with Hannover and Paderborn both hoping for an unlikely favour from already-relegated Münster against Elversberg, which had the better goal difference.
With Hannover not able to go beyond a 3:3 draw against ‘Der Club’, 1 FC Nuremberg, at the Niedersachsenstadion, a 3-0 win on Sunday against already relegated Preußen Münster at the club’s sold-out Waldstadion an der Kaiserslinde, was enough for a club that was only promoted from the third tier in 22/23 – a piece of German football history has been made.
Elversberg, a club in a town of just under 13,000 inhabitants, even reaching the second tier borders on incredible; reaching the Bundesliga, in spite of play-off participation in 24/25, which they narrowly lost 4-3 on aggregate over two legs to 1. FC Heidenheim is an absolute sensation – They should have been warned.
The SVE have completed an outstanding 25/26, losing only 8 times, notching up 64 points and with notable wins over top promotion candidates Paderborn 5-1, 3-0 against top side Karlsruher SC, and 3-1 away at 4-time Deutsche Meister 1 FC Kaiserlautern’s fortress Betzenberg, ending the season, in spite of losing their top scorer Younes Ebnoutalib (12) to Frankfurt, with the best goal difference, +25.
It would be easy to speculate that the club is another Hoffenheim, who hail from a village of 3,000 inhabitants, also in the South-West. Hoffenheim are backed by SAP founder billionaire Dietmar Hopp, who is reported by Transfermarkt to have invested over €350m to take the club from the sixth to the Champions League in the last 25 years. But the comparison is only partly right: the club known as ‘Die Elv’ are much more than that.
The principal sponsors and stadium name givers are Ursapharm, a pharmaceutical business of 833 employees in the optical industry. The club’s chairman, Frank Holzer, doubles as chairman of the local company and is a former professional footballer who played for Eintracht Braunschweig and local rivals 1. FC Saarbrücken.
Holzer’s vision is also backed by the community. Hundreds of local concerns, both large and very small, have stepped in to sponsor the club, including one called “Aliens are Real”, about whom we can only speculate.
Holzer was born in Neunkirchen, just 5km from the club’s stadium. He inherited Ursapharm from his father, Albrecht. Now seventy-two, he has made Elversberg his personal project: on three occasions, he even stepped in as interim manager. He is passionate about the game and knows it from the ground up.
His stated dream is to “make the club real rivals to 1. FC Saarbrücken”. Saarbrücken is a city of almost 200,000 inhabitants; the club finished twice in the 1940s and 50s as vice-champions, and have been a constant in the second and first tiers for large parts of their history. Well, he has achieved exactly that.
So Holzer certainly has ambition and a real vision for Elversberg. According to public records, Ursapharm have invested €13m in the club. But this has mainly been in the infrastructure, not the players, principally the training facilities and the stadium. In the last five seasons, based on Transfer Market estimates, only €4.83m — a little more than the cost of an average Bundesliga player — has been invested in the playing staff. Wagner has instead preferred to focus on loan players, those out of contract, and on young talent.
The manager is clear about what drives the club to success. “We want to spread joy and get the love of the game back. I think we’re achieving that,” said Wagner in a recent interview with local TV station SWR. That much is certain: as they were in 24/25, home games at the Stadion an der Kaiserlinde were almost singularly sold out for most games in 25/26.
The Saarland region is no stranger to surprises in football. FC 08 Homburg, a club from a town of 42,000 inhabitants, was promoted to the Bundesliga in 86/87 only to crash out two seasons later. Not before a major bust-up, in which they were banned on “ethical and moral” grounds from wearing their kit, emblazoned with the logo of a condom brand intriguingly called ‘London’.
Founded in 1907, Elversberg are very far from the football top brass. The club has spent most of its history beneath the fifth tier. It rose to the third tier, then Amateurliga Saarland, between 1951 and 60, but then disappeared, falling as low as the seventh tier, the Landesliga, in 85/86.
Among the former players are Brentford and Wimbledon striker Gary Blissett. After playing 84 matches in the fourth tier between 1997-00, Blisset went on to become assistant manager during the club’s first successful era in the Regionalliga-Südwest, the South-West division of the fourth tier in 1996/97. He stayed for a total of 11 years at the Stadion an der Kaiserlinde.
The club’s story is one of persistence. In 2013/14, they rose again to the fourth tier but were once again relegated. In both 15/16 and the following season, the club missed promotion in the playoffs.
The modest side’s most recent ascent began with its promotion to the 3. Liga in 2022. Promotion straight through to the second tier at the end of that season followed… they will soon be facing BVB, Bayern, and Leipzig.
SVE’s management has repeatedly shown a lucky hand with transfers. This includes Carlo Sickinger, who has rediscovered the joy of playing after a difficult time blighted by injury at second-tier SV Sandhausen. “Vincent Wagner has put the fun back into the team,” the 28-year-old recently said about his coach. The defender goes further, describing Wagner’s coaching methods as a “sensation”.
The 40-year-old coach has found fans among analysts for the highly fluid and tactically innovative pressing game they have been displaying. Caio Miguel of Total Football Analysis glowed: “SVE’s defence and attack are among the best in the league, Vincent Wagner is leading the club to unthinkable heights”.
Among the other players who are leading the way is Bulgaria international striker Lukas Petkov, who is currently ninth in the 2. Bundesliga scorer table with 13 goals, who was nominated for 2. Bundesliga Player Of The Season is the most prominent. In attack, he is supported by top winger Tom Zimmerschied, who has played in all games this season and picked up 4 goals and provided 8 assists.
Like all title-winners, the SVE side has a strong defence. Centre-back and captain Lukas Pinckert has been the defensive leader since joining from Viktoria Berlin in 2022. He works optimally alongside right-back Maximilian Rohr, who has been with the club since 2022. Austrian goalkeeper Nicolas Kristof has also developed into an absolute mainstay since arriving from fourth-tier Walldorf in the summer of 2022.
Holger Osieck, World Cup-winning assistant manager with Germany at Italia ’90, who also managed VfL Bochum, Olympique Marseille, and won the AFC Champions League with Japan’s Urawa Red Diamonds, and a local Saarland resident, praised the club’s vision: “They have highly competent management and a vision. Qualifying for the play-offs would be a great and unexpected achievement for them, promotion would be a just reward for their efforts.”
What Ursapharm owner Frank Holzer is doing is investing further in the infrastructure, and developments are exciting. A lot has happened both on and off the pitch. The 9790-capacity stadium at the Kaiserlinde has undergone an enormous transformation to expand capacity to 15,000 for the first tier. Whilst this would still be the smallest in the league, the club don’t lack ambition.
The work on the stadium is extensive. In addition to constructing the main stand, the standing area has also been extended. The west stand behind the goal has also been rebuilt and partially opened. The work will provide just under 3,500 new standing places. The new stand, still partly a temporary structure, must be completed by the end of 2026.
The construction of the new arena will cost just under €30m. But according to Wagner, speaking to regional radio station SWR, the project will not stop there: “We have designed and built something together. There is an opportunity to develop further. That applies to my work and the entire club. Elversberg is an exciting project.” But did they start building with the Bundesliga in mind?
The rise of the ‘Schwarz-Weißen’ has not been without its detractors. Thorsten Poppe, a sports reporter with state broadcaster ZDF who has followed the club’s rise, is sceptical: “Any stay in the top tier will be short-lived, the club cannot sustain itself without Ursapharm, a small town of 13,000 can’t realistically fund a club at that level”.
The club now have their first ever Bundesliga season in their 119 year history ahead of them to prove critics wrong. There, the team with a minuscule squad value, which would barely buy a half-decent striker in the Bundesliga, will meet sides, many of which will be taking part in European competitions and have squad values more than 10-times that of Elversberg’s €28m.
The promotion was far from secure on match day 34; it went down to the last throw of the dice after a crushing loss to Fortuna Düsseldorf on Sunday, who were crushingly relegated to the third tier after losing 3-0 away to Greuther Fürth for only the second time in their history today.
Even in the moment of greatest success, Wagner, who made 222 professional appearances as a defender across spells at Rot-Weiss Essen and Uerdingen, remains humble. “I’m feeling pretty relaxed. It’s sunk in that we’ve made history. A friend of mine said that Elversberg’s promotion would be like a flight to the moon. Today, we’ve managed to land on the moon,” explains the Nordhausen-born manager, who many are marking up for bigger things.
Whilst many amongst the Bundesliga aristocracy will be put out by the arrival of the parvenu from the remote state of Saarland, and many may regard SV Elversberg as little more than the ambition of one man. Many neutrals, though, will be backing the plucky little club from the little village in Saarland; that much is certain.